“What?” Sarah says, and I stop at the doorway.
“From The Washington Post. Says here that Susan tried to donate Bernice to a group called Service Dogs for the Handicapped. I can almost hear the wheelchairs plowing into each other, can’t you?” He laughs so hard he coughs: kack-kack-kack.
“Very funny,” Sarah says.
“Bernice is gone?” I say, surprised to feel a twinge inside.
“Gone but not forgotten,” Ben says, recovering enough to hit another key. “They didn’t want her, evidently. They only take puppies.”
“So where is she?” I ask from the doorway, only half wanting to know.
Ben hits the key again. “It doesn’t say.”
“I know,” Eletha says. She walks into the room, waving a yellow Post-it on her finger. “They just called.”
“Who did?”
She holds the paper in front of my face. On it is a phone number I don’t recognize. “I voted for Susan, but I’ll never forgive myself.”
“She’s too big, Mom,” Maddie says, shuddering in her nightgown. “Look at her teeth.”
Bernice strains against her red collar, which still says A. GREGORIAN; her wagging tail swats my thigh with each beat.
“But I’m holding her, honey. She won’t hurt you, she can’t. Just come over and let her sniff you. She’s all clean now.” I bathed Bernice right after I bathed Maddie, using green flea shampoo they sold me at the dog pound, along with a leash, two steel bowls, and a thirty-dollar trowel for shoveling a megaton of dogshit.
“Rrronononr,” Bernice grumbles, a guttural noise that makes Maddie’s blue eyes widen in fear.
“What’s that?”
“She’s talking to you, honey. She wants you to love her.”
“But I don’t love her. I don’t even like her.” Maddie tugs anxiously at the end of a damp strand of hair; her hair looks brown when it’s wet, more like my mother’s original russet color than her own blazing red.
“Aw, can’t you just give her a little pat on the head? Her hair’s washed too.” I scratch Bernice’s newly coiffed crown and she looks back gratefully, her tongue lolling out. “See? Look how happy she is to be with us.”
“But why did we have to take her?”
“Because nobody else would. They all have apartments that don’t allow pets. We’re the only ones with a house who could have a pet.”
“They could move.”
“No. Now come closer.”
She doesn’t budge. “Why couldn’t you just leave her there? In the dog pound.”
“You know what would happen to her. You saw Lady and the Tramp.”
“They don’t do that right away, Mom. They wait about six or five weeks.”
“No, they don’t wait that long.”
“Somebody else could have adopted her.”
“I don’t think anybody would have. You should have seen her in the cage.” I flash on the scene at the pound; Bernice penned by herself, barking frantically next to a streetwise pit bull. “Nobody would have taken her, Maddie. Most people like puppies, not dogs.”
“I like puppies. Little puppies.”
I sigh. I got my second wind when I washed Bernice, but the day’s awful events and my own fatigue are catching up with me.
“It’s not my fault, Mom.” Maddie pouts. “She’s scary.”
“I know, you’re being very brave. How about you go up to bed now? You look tired.”
“I’m not tired. You always say I’m tired when I’m not.”
“All right, you’re not tired, but I am. Go up to bed, and I’ll be right up.”
She makes a wide arc around Bernice, then scurries upstairs, and I take the disappointed dog into the kitchen and put her behind an old plastic baby gate. She whimpers behind the fence, but I don’t look back. I reach Maddie’s room just as she turns off the light and hops into bed. “She’s so big, Mom,” she says, a small voice in the dark.
I sit down at the edge of the narrow bunk bed and let my weariness wash over me. I smooth Maddie’s damp bangs back over the uneven part in her hair. It reminds me of Sally Gilpin, and I feel grateful to have my daughter with me, however terrified she is of big dogs. That much is right in the world. “I understand, baby.”
“Where will she sleep?” Maddie says, digging in her mouth with a finger, worrying a loose tooth from its moorings.
A good question, only one of the hundred I haven’t answered. “I have it all figured out.”
“Mom, look,” she says with difficulty, owing to the fist in her mouth. Her eyes glitter in the dim light from the hallway. Huge round eyes, like Sam’s; my color but his shape. Across the bridge of her nose is a constellation of tiny freckles too faint to see in the dark.
“Look at what?”
“Look.” She moves her hand, pointing at one of her front teeth, which has been wrenched to the left.
“Gross, Maddie. It’s not ready. Put it back the way it was, please.”
“Everyone else has their teeth out. My whole class.”
“But you’re younger, remember? Because of when your birthday is.”
“Duh, Mom.”
“Duh, Mads.”
She punches the tooth back into place with a red-polished fingernail. “It doesn’t even hurt when I do that tooth thing. I like to stick my tongue up in the top.” Which is exactly what she does next.
“Stop, Maddie.”
“You know how there’s like the top of your teeth? And you can stick your tongue in the top and wiggle it around?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, I like to stick my tongue in there and make like buck teeth.”
“Terrific. Just do it with your tongue, not your finger, okay? And don’t show it to me or I’ll barf.”
“Why can’t I use my finger? It works better.”
“You’ll give yourself an infection.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Fine. Don’t blame me when your mouth explodes.”
She giggles.
“You think that’s funny?”
She nods and giggles again, so I reach under the covers and tickle her under her nightgown. “No. No tickling!” she says.
“But you love to be tickled.”
“No, I hate it. Madeline likes it. You can tickle her.” She fishes under the thin blanket and locates her Madeline doll, which she shoves at my chest. “Tickle her.”
I look down at the soft rag doll with its wide-brimmed yellow felt hat. Madeline has a face like a dinner plate, with wide-set black dots for eyes and a smile stitched in bumpy red thread. Her orange yarn hair is the same color as Maddie’s, but we didn’t name Maddie after the Ludwig Bemelmans books, we named her after Sam’s grandmother.